Tuesday, January 19, 2010

This site claims to have correctly predicted the outcome of all thirty five Senate races in 2008.

Using its own forecasting model, Five Thirty Eight thinks Republican Scott Brown is good to go for the Massachusetts’ Senate seat.

Brown will be the first Republican to hold a senate seat since Edward Brooke was in office (from 1967 to 1972). Brooke might as well have been a Democrat; he was a Big Government politician and quite progressive. Ah, those were the days, back when “Rockefeller Republicans” loathed Richard Nixon and fought his appointments to the Supreme Court.

Brooke made history by being the first black ever elected to the Senate, and remained the only one until 1993, when Carol Moseley Braun was crowned by the state of Illinois. Besides race and a tendency toward progressive thought by Senator Brooke, these two have little in common. Senator Braun played politics Illinois-style and Mr. Brooke had been an old-fashioned black Republican (before the Dems bribed black Americans with promises of hand-outs and created Professional Grievance Mongers, many blacks were Republican. They knew well who’d done the lynchings and who prevented them from voting. But now the politics of those responsible, i.e., Democrats, has been shoved down the Memory Hole):

During [her] campaign, Moseley-Braun announced that “with this fundraising, as God is my witness, I will never go hungry again.” (Her campaign raised $7 million dollars).

Much of that money went to Kgoise Matthews, her campaign manager and later fiancé, whose previous experience was as a valet for Jesse Jackson. She paid him $15,000 per month and gave him unprecedented control over the campaign’s finances, which were full of irregularities. He burned through the entire $7 million and more; they had to borrow money in the last days of the campaign, despite spending only $1 million on TV ads.

That’s not to say Massachusetts politics is any cleaner. No state can have Deval Patrick as its governor and a history of hanging on to Edward “No Integrity Whatsoever” Kennedy as its Senior Senator for Life without having its ethical IQ called into question.

But enough of history, be it black folks in the Senate or Politicians Past in Massachusetts or Illinois. Today is the day and here is what Five Thirty Eight thinks:

The FiveThirtyEight Senate Forecasting Model, which correctly predicted the outcome of all 35 Senate races in 2008, now regards Republican Scott Brown as a 74 percent favorite to win the Senate seat in Massachusetts on the basis of new polling from ARG, Research 2000 and InsiderAdvantage which show worsening numbers for Brown’s opponent, Martha Coakley.

We have traditionally categorized races in which one side has between a 60 and 80 percent chance of winning as “leaning” toward that candidate, and so that is how we categorize this race now: Lean GOP. Nevertheless, there is a higher-than-usual chance of large, correlated errors in the polling, such as were observed in NY-23 and the New Hampshire Democratic primary; the model hedges against this risk partially, but not completely.

Coakley’s odds are substantially worse than they appeared to be 24 hours ago, when there were fewer credible polls to evaluate and there appeared to be some chance that her numbers were bottoming out and perhaps reversing. However, the ARG and Research 2000 polls both show clear and recent trends against her. Indeed the model, which was optimized for regular rather than special elections, may be too slow to incorporate new information and may understate the magnitude of the trend toward Brown.

The Boston Herald, which is not owned by the Old Grey Doxy in New York, is definitley pro-Brown and supplies the many reasons why Martha Coakley is a “loser”:- - - - - - - - -

No matter what happens at the ballot box tomorrow, one thing is certain: Martha Coakley is a loser.

Even if Bill Clinton and Barack Obama can somehow rescue her candidacy, Coakley will never recover from the self-inflicted damage of the worst political campaign in recent history.

Win or lose, she will forever be Martha the Blind - the woman who couldn’t see terrorists in Afghanistan, or a staffer giving a beatdown to a reporter right before her eyes. She’s Sen. Spellcheck, forced to pull one ad because her campaign misspelled Massachusetts, then another because it superimposed Scott Brown’s image in front of the World Trade Center.

Given the incompetence of her campaign, she was lucky it was a pre-9/11 photo of the towers.

In the Democratic primary, Coakley ran on the one thing she couldn’t get wrong: being a woman. It’s been downhill ever since.

Right after losing the primary, Rep. Michael Capuano was asked what he learned on the campaign trail. “You’re screwed,” he told his Democratic colleagues. Everyone wondered what he meant. Now we know.

While Scott Brown was wearing out a set of truck tires on retail politics, Coakley sniffed at the idea of “standing outside Fenway Park, in the cold, shaking hands.” She certainly didn’t waste time explaining her positions on health care or national security to the voters, in part because when she tried, it became painfully clear she didn’t understand them herself.

Coakley’s arrogant assumption of victory was so strong that midway through the brief campaign season, she simply disappeared off the campaign trail for days.

[..]

This is the kind of political stupidity it takes for a Democrat to lose a Senate race in Massachusetts. You can’t just run a weak campaign, or commit a gaffe or two. You’ve got to run an absolute disaster of a campaign to lose to a Republican here.

And that’s what Coakley delivered. It wasn’t the Hindenburg or the Titanic. It was the Hindenburg crashing into the Titanic.

Now all we have to do is wait for the counting of the votes and hope that ACORN hasn't dug up its usual hundreds of dead voters and propped them up for one more round...